The paper inquires into the impact of contemporary major world events - the recession in the United States and Western Europe, the oil price hike, and the Arab Spring - on the flow of overseas Filipino workers or OFWs and their remittances. The paper finds that the recession in the West has not...

While people in democracies can vote their government out when they are discontent with its policies, those in dictatorships cannot do so. They can only attempt to expel the dictator via mass protests or revolutions. Based on a general cause-and-effect mechanism, the author analyzes whether such...

This paper examines the learning of authoritarian regimes in the early phase of the Arab uprisings. Differentiating conceptually between learning and policy change, we analyze and compare the authoritarian regimes of Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, and Syria and their reactions to the challenge of...